For The At-Home Mixologist Here’s Where Bitters Come Into Play

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Any bar aficionado can attest to the importance of bitters when creating a cocktail. You’ve probably seen those cool, kind of old-school looking little bottles behind the bar at your local watering hole, and you’ve always wondered what they’re used for. Bitters impact a cocktail just like salt impacts almost everything you cook. They’re known to improve, balance and emphasize certain flavors in your drink, while also bringing their own bold flavor to the mix.

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So what exactly are bitters made of? On a fundamental level, it’s liquor that’s intensely infused by barks, herbs, roots, flowers, fruits and other bits and pieces of plants. They originally came about for medicinal purposes, but now there are hundreds of types of bitters out there. The main types that you’ll see at your local bar are digestive bitters, which you would typically drink, either neat or over ice, at the end of a meal. Then there are cocktail bitters or aromatic bitters (common brands include Angostura, Peychaud’s, Fee Brothers and Bittermens), which have a pretty high alcohol content.

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Cocktail bitters are usually sour, bitter or bittersweet. Since Angostura still dominates most of the bitters market, let’s talk about this legendary brand and what exactly their bitters do. You probably recognize the bottle for its oversized label. Each dose of bitters is concentrated with a botanically infused alcoholic combination made with water, 44.7 percent of which is alcohol, and the rest is made with gentian root, herbs and spices. This is the brand you’ll see in most cocktail recipes out there.

The O.G. cocktail, an Old Fashioned, is the perfect example of using bitters. This cocktail is made with bourbon or rye, a few dashes of Angostura bitters (orange), a sugar cube and club soda. Some people like to use a giant ice cube or an orange peel to release those citrus oils. No matter how you make an Old Fashioned, bitters always come into play.

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Back in the 1800s, using bitters was hugely popular, but bitters companies subsided when the government cracked down on alcohol around the time of Prohibition. Angostura was basically the only bitters company to stick around and it remains one of the most well-known brands to this day.

It wasn’t until the recent renewed interest from consumers in craft cocktails, that bitters have been making a massive return. The bitters world is occupied by both mass-market companies and small-batch hand-crafted brands. Orange is the most common flavor of the citrus bitters and then there are herbal bitters with notes like thyme, mint and tarragon. There are also nut bitters like coffee and chocolate. Pick the right bitters for you based on the other flavors in your drink. If you keep them in your liquor cabinet, they could keep for up to five years!